A team of three students (Kaisa Anttila, Markku Vään and Sami Mylly) from the University of Oulu in Finland recently conducted an usability study on FreedroidRPG, which results are now available.

They basically studied the game from a player point of view in order to find out what could be done to improve the user experience, basing themselves on different precise criterias. The two documents they produced will be useful to anybody who wants to contribute to FreedroidRPG : it lists issues in a way that are easy for a newcomer to understand and try to think of a solution for.

A text report and slides are available on the UsabilityStudy page of our wiki. If you feel annoyed by one of the things they listed, just think of a possible solution, and try to send us a patch!

We recently received word from a major game edition company, that they had a strong interest in FreedroidRPG and wanted to buy the rights and pay Arthur to work on it. They required a rewrite of the engine in full 3D, which was started two weeks ago. Due to our lack of content contributors, maps and dialogs will be provided by the publisher's own staff. The game is expected to be released in May 2009 as a proprietary game and will sell at approximately 30EUR. As a bonus, source code and data will be available on CD for as little as 3000EUR. We expect to start taking preorders within a few weeks as soon as legal agreements have been fully settled. We'll tell you more about this, including the company name, when our NDA is over!

The FreedroidRPG team hoped to become a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2008.
Unfortunately we have not been selected, despite our detailed project ideas list and our commitment in the writing of the application. Google Summer of Code organizers were kind enough to tell us what should have been improved, and we will apply again next year with those things fixed, hopefully with a better outcome this time!
In the meantime, if you are looking for some work this summer, and have interest in game development, we have a few exciting challenges for you on the project ideas list!

Iwan Gabovitch (aka qubodup) contributed new screenshots.
Arthur cleaned up the wiki to make it slightly less outdated and much more readable, check it out!

FreedroidRPG was recently modified to be fully localized. It now relies solely on gettext() for that.
The Launchpad page was updated with the new translation templates and is now ready for production.
Your contributions are appreciated!

First of all, happy new year to all of our users!
After the publication of the english dialog script, that can be used to translate the dialogs in the game, we're happy to let you know that a page was set up on launchpad.net for the translation of in-game text (this doesn't yet include item descriptions because we do not know how to do it...). Feel free to help, for example by creating .po files for your language and starting the translation!

Something special for all people interested in translating our game!
At the end of this message you will find a link to the whole dialogue script of FreedroidRPG.
Translating is really easy. Just download the file, replace the text you want replaced with the text in your target language, and send it to us!
Good luck.

Please use launchpad.net for translations, we no longer accept translated scripts for dialog localization.

Finally. FreedroidRPG 0.10.3 is out the gates.
You can get it from here: [Download freedroidRPG 0.10.3 ]

This release brought back Sorenson and Magic into the game.
While those bits are not fully developed yet, they are a nice starting point.
We also added a new quest, a new bot and a new area.
A lot of things in the game were given new graphics, quite notably the main interface and dialog fonts.
Translations are mostly up to date, we have German and French at the moment. The Polish and Russian translations are in progress.
There were the usual bugfixes, small gameplay and performance improvements, etc.

Please remember that FreedroidRPG is made out of people.
We need more help from the community if we want to keep the releases happening.
We are looking for people to help in the following areas:
- sound effects
- item editing
- better savegame system (no more binary dumps)
- new translations
- map editing
Please contact us on the IRC channel or the mailing list if you are our man (or woman)!
The next version of FreedroidRPG will be numbered 0.10.4, and we plan to start the rc process in December.
Depending on demand we might do a bugfix/translation release before that.

For this release we received a lot of help from external people. Special thanks for this release are:

Jon Severinsson - various code fixes and suggestions
Cygal - code fix, feedback
Colin Pitrat - gettext() support, unused yet
David Kremer - french translation
Danny Czoczek - update of german translation
Antoine Jacoutot - fixes for building on OpenBSD
Kibergus - map work, not included yet
Lots of people - bug reports, feedback
If you have been forgotten - please contact ahuillet who will fix that as soon as possible

Blood, Stone, Cog.
FreedroidRPG development team.